


Just A Text

by Merayi



Series: TransFormation [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Anorexic Kylo (implied), Awkward Crush, Captain Phasma, Crushes, Difficult Decisions, Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Transphobia, Kylo Ren Angst, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, LGBTQ Character, POV Kylo Ren, Phasma Ships It, Prosthetics, Puppy Love, Self-Hatred, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans Kylo Ren, Wingman Phasma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 12:26:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15751647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merayi/pseuds/Merayi
Summary: A week after meeting a caring stranger in a bar, Kyla tries to make the decision whether or not to take her up on her offer and send her a text. It should be a simple decision, but it is not.





	Just A Text

**Author's Note:**

> I intended to write this a lot sooner than I did. Oops.

It took Kyla a full week to muster the courage to text Rey. Most of that courage had been sparked by the conversation with Phasma the night before, when the blunt blonde had threatened to text Rey for her, just to put an end to Kyla’s moping.

“I am not moping!” she had argued loudly, slumped over the shabby couch. Phasma had just looked at her from the kitchen bench where she had been washing dishes, merely raising a sparse, blonde eyebrow. Kyla caught the look. “I’m not!”

“You have been jumping three feet every time your phone goes off for the last week, and then glaring at it like it bit you,” Phasma said, infuriatingly calmly, “Just text her. She obviously liked you, and you’ve been singing her praises since she dropped you off.”

“I don’t… I’m not… I… I… can’t….” Kyla turned over, burying her face in the couch cushion. Stuffing puffed from a torn seam. The cushion muffled her grouchy curse.

“You can’t?” Kyla could hear her flatmate’s raised eyebrow. “If you really mean to tell me that you cannot type a message into your phone and hit send, I would be happy to do it for you.”

“Like hell you will!” Kyla sat up sharply. She didn’t even want to imagine what Phasma would write; the burly woman was not well-known for her warmth or tenderness. “It’s not that easy!”

“Kyla,” Phasma sighed, leaning on the kitchen bench and wiping her hands on a grungy tea towel, “Seriously. You don’t have many friends. I don’t want to put up with you mooning around the house anymore. So, consider this an ultimatum. You have until 5pm tomorrow to text her, or I will.”

“But…” How could Kyla put into words the conflict inside her? Even more difficult, how could she put it into words Phasma would get? Instead, she rolled her eyes, and got up from the couch, adjusting her prosthetics absently. “Fine. You’re a bitch, Phasma.”

“One of us has to be, if anything is going to get done.”

Without another word, Kyla trudged out of the kitchen and down the hall to her bedroom. She shut the door behind her firmly. Time to draft a text.

Well, time to /think/ about drafting a text.

Leaning back against the doorframe, Kyla cast a scathing eye around the messy room as though it were the first time she had seen it. Practically everything she owned fit in this tiny room.

The meagre furniture wasn’t even hers, but had come with the flat: a splintered, plain wooden desk that sat on rusted, metal legs; an ancient computer chair that creaked and sunk when sat on; the single shelf annoyingly bolted to the wall above the desk; an unmade single bed that Kyla’s feet hung off the end of when she lay down; the closet built into the wall, its door a floor-length mirror that everything in her wanted to smash. The stained, threadbare carpet was peeling up around the corners of the room. The window frames were rotting. Kyla was generally a meticulously clean person – about some things, as much as she could be – but the only way to make this room look clean would be to burn it and start over somewhere else.

Kyla didn’t have any bookshelves, so her excessive book collection teetered in stacks on the floor. Her favourite books lived just beside the foot of her bed. The clothes she never wore (the ones she had had to wear when she had had to pretend she was male) were all stuffed deep in the back of her closet, where she never had to see them. Not wanting her /actual/ clothes associated with them, dresses and skirts and jeans and shirts and heels were in hastily-folded piles where there was room amid the books.

Her walls were papered with posters – Star Wars, Galactic Empire, Leprous, NASA, Dr. Who, Orange is the New Black, Victoria Frances. The one shelf displayed an extensive collection of Star Wars figurines, packed tightly together in the little space they had. The clock ticking on the wall looked like the Death Star. Her nightlight – not that she would ever admit to anyone that she still slept with a nightlight on – was Darth Vader’s lightsaber. Her trash can was shaped like R2-D2. A Chewbacca teddy bear sat on her pillow.

It was pathetic. Her room was a shrine to all things pathetic. She couldn’t allow a stranger in here. But, most of these things had been given to her when she was a kid, gifts from her parents (because it was okay for a boy to like sci-fi, and they had happily encouraged her more ‘masc’ interests), so she couldn’t face getting rid of it. She still clung to the things that made her feel like a little kid, that reminded her of the time before everything turned to shit, that she could use to escape.

Kyla could just imagine it. Rey – the epitome of feminine and beautiful, with her comfy, draped cardigan and warm-caramel skin and graceful, smiley softness, who was honourable enough to fight for strangers in bar bathrooms – would run a mile to see a place this messy and tacky and shabby.

Phasma was right; Kyla didn’t really have friends.

Slumping against the doorframe, she sighed. She could never explain why to Phasma. Phasma was one of the “success stories” that the upper-middle class loved to promote. She and her younger brother had grown up in some poverty-stricken religious cult. She had left and joined the military as soon as she could, moved to the local army base, and climbed up the ranks. She had served two tours in Iraq and came back with an Army Commendation Medal and a left leg that was metal from the knee down.

She’d had the prosthetic armoured in chrome. Phasma might have been tough as guts, but she did have a sense of style, buried under the practicality.

Upon discovering that people tended to listen when she talked, the newly-promoted Captain Phasma had chosen to train first-year officer cadets at the closest military academy. It was unusual for a Captain to be an instructor, and the pay was shit, but she didn’t seem to care. 

Phasma didn’t just not care if people didn’t like her; she actively got rid of anyone who didn’t like her. Prejudice, insults, odd glances had bounced like rubber bullets off armour, until she had managed to separate herself from the person who had been on the receiving end of that prejudice and those insults and those odd glances. No one dared treat an imposing Captain like they would a homeless cultist.

Phasma had forgotten what it was like to be on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. That was something Kyla longed to be able to forget. She didn’t have the tough hide that her flatmate had been born with.

Unlike Phasma, Kyla had been born at the top of that ladder and had slid further down with every minority group she had realized she was part of. She had grown up painfully aware of everything that she was, and everything that she wasn’t. A penniless trans lesbian on the autistic spectrum, who would never ‘pass’ as cis, who suffered from severe depression and anorexia as well as anger management issues, who was the child of one of the country’s most outspoken left-wing politicians? Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t just paint a target on her back and have done with it. Often, she was selfishly, horribly grateful that she wasn’t black as well.

Wincing at her own awful thoughts, Kyla flopped onto her bed, her feet dangling off the edge. She stared at the galaxy posters on the ceiling. She punched her pillow into a more comfortable shape. She kicked her skinny legs awkwardly, and then stopped when her thighs quivered too much. They still weren’t skinny enough. She cuddled her Chewbacca toy to her chest. She pulled her quilt over her head. Each square was a comic-book-style portrait of a Star Wars character. It was a classic, and she loved it.

She tried to face writing one silly, pointless text. She tried to quash the hope that she might make a friend. She couldn’t do it. She hated herself.

She just hated herself.

Everything in her life had transpired to show her what a waste of oxygen she was. She was a monster, a freak, a savage. She ran her hand over her blunt brow and big ears and angular jaw, cursing when she felt scruffy stubble under her hand. “Look at the Incredible Bearded Lady!” the cruel, little voice in the back of her head laughed.

Kyla had known as soon as she had words to understand it that she was different, bad, wrong; if there was a “normal”, she was on the planet it was furthest from.

She knew she wasn’t the son her parents wanted. And, if even her parents didn’t want her – the people who were supposed to love her unconditionally – how could she expect anyone else to? She was too socially awkward for people to like her much. She was too masculine for other lesbian girls to find her attractive. She had been told that she was too “skinny” to be attractive, but she knew that was just an excuse, just a word plucked out of the air because the person couldn’t outright say “too fucking ugly”.

A quiet voice piped up from the back of her mind. Rey had said that she was bi. That meant attracted to both boys and girls. Maybe, that also meant that she would be attracted to one person who kinda looked like both. Maybe, that meant that she wouldn’t be so disgusted with what Kyla looked like. After all, she had… she had seen way more of Kyla than she should have, and she still hadn’t looked even a little disgusted. Rey had still looked her in the eye, even with her clothes askew and false boobs on show and her cock like a fucking flagpole. She hadn’t sneered when she had heard Kyla’s voice. She hadn’t pitied her.

Kyla turned over, clutching Chewie to her chest. Leftover humiliation made her eyes sting and her throat go tight. Thinking about that night left her feeling all panicky and awful, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it because she couldn’t stop thinking about /Rey/.

Rey hadn’t run away, even when Kyla had ended up crying all over her like a baby (oh, God, though, did that make Kyla cringe!). Hell, Rey had even called Kyla “xe” when she didn’t know what pronouns to use, and “she” when she did. Kyla had smiled all night because of that alone. It was kinda pathetic that she got all smiley when someone used the right pronouns, but it happened so infrequently. 

Rey had faced down Armitage Hux and his thugs single-handedly to protect Kyla. She had stayed with her and offered her a hug and held her for ages and rubbed her back and listened to her without judging and had tried to make her laugh when she had felt better. She had given Kyla her jacket like she was a proper lady and had promised that she wasn’t being nice because she wanted something and had gotten all beautifully pink and flustered when she said too much and had held Kyla’s hand when she introduced her to her friends. Kyla couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched her in a way that was designed to be comforting, rather than violating. It had felt so good when Rey had held her.

No. Kyla stopped herself. She couldn’t risk thinking like that. She couldn’t risk thinking of her. She wished she could /stop/ thinking about her.

That was what Phasma didn’t get. It wasn’t that Kyla didn’t want to text Rey, that she didn’t want to see her again; it was that she wanted to protect her. She wanted to protect Rey from the rages that she couldn’t control and that she knew hurt people, from the bad-brain days that left her numb and bed-ridden, from the obliviousness that made her say things that came out hurtful when she didn’t mean them to be, from the ever-present cameras that flashed when she was recognized as an Organa, from the odd glances and the comments that people made, from the violence against people like her from people like Hux, from all the darkness in her life. Someone like Rey wouldn’t cope with someone like Kyla.

Also, being social so often meant food – meeting for lunch or going to the movies with popcorn and sugar or talking over coffee – and that was something Kyla couldn’t cope with. She hated eating in front of people. That was just another one of the awkward things that people didn’t get about her.

It was better that she stayed away.

But, if she didn’t text her, Phasma would, and that would be infinitely worse.

So, finally, Kyla swung her legs over the edge of her bed and moved to sit at her desk. The chair sunk when she sat on it. One day, Kyla would be slim enough that it wouldn’t do that anymore.

Taking a breath, she reached for the stack of nice paper she saved for proper letters and the exquisite fountain pen that had been a gift from her father. It was overkill, she knew. She was just going to end up wasting ink and paper. But, it still felt right. This was a special occasion. Even if she wouldn’t be sending it as a letter, drafting a message to Rey deserved her best paper.

/Dear Rey…/ she began.

No, too formal. It was still a text. She crossed it out with a thin, neat line.

/Rey…/ There, that was better.

/It’s me, Kyla, from the bar last weekend…/

No, that made her sound like a one-night stand. She crossed it out, more scribbly this time. Anger started to bubble in her gut. It was just a text! She sent texts all the time! Why was this so fucking difficult?! It shouldn’t be this fucking difficult! 

Kyla gave a cry of frustration, slamming a hand down on her pathetic, cheap, rusty desk. 

Her fist clenched around the fountain pen, and the cold metal starting to warm and warp under her hand scared the anger out of her. The pen was too special to her for her to risk breaking it. Her rages had left too many of her things broken. They had left /her/ too broken. 

Slowly, Kyla breathed in, breathed out, tried to focus herself. She sought calmness, peace, that elusive place inside herself where she felt the most comfortable. Sometimes, it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. This time, it did. 

Like a Force inside her was dictating to her, she felt the words form.

Kyla put pen to paper. She closed her eyes. She wrote.

/Rey, it was great to meet you last week, though I do agree it would have been better under different circumstances! I’m free this coming weekend, and…./


End file.
